A Moveable Feast (21 page)

Ruth Rabin discovered her love of writing a few years ago while dabbling in screenwriting and creative writing courses at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. Several of her pieces were published in
Red Wheelbarrow,
De Anza’s literary magazine, and her story ‘A Grandmother’s Treasure’ won second place in that magazine’s nonfiction category. Ruth is currently enrolled in the MFA program in Creative Writing at San José State University. She has won the Bonita Cox Award for nonfiction and the James Phelan Award for fiction in SJSU’s English Department’s annual writing contest. Ruth teaches elementary school in her real life, and lives in the Bay Area with her two children.

There were only two tables inside the café and both were crowded with old men puffing away at nasty-smelling cigarettes. The ceiling fan turned so slowly that all it accomplished was tangling the thick smoke with the solid heat of the morning. The men stopped talking when I walked in. One of them stood up quickly and began to make room for me at one of the tables, clearing away
ashtrays and gruffly shooing away a few of the others so I could sit down. Through wide smiles and effusive hand gestures, I indicated that I would be fine sitting outside and that they should not go to any trouble.

There were two tables outside. A man was sitting at one of them, so I went to the empty one, pulled out a chair and sat down.

Cairo in April. It was only spring, yet the city was already suffocatingly hot and dusty, and the streets were crammed. When men walked past me, they brushed their hands across my ass without once moving their eyes from some invisible spot in front of them.

‘Coffee?’ It was the old bossy man from inside.

‘Min fadlak.’
Yes, please.

I had been awoken at dawn by the muezzin’s call to prayer, which is broadcast throughout the city from loudspeakers, the largest and loudest of which assuredly had been set up right outside my hotel window. So, yes, please, I’d love some coffee.

‘And may I have a glass of ice water too?’ He smiled politely, his few remaining teeth tobacco-stained and crooked, and gave a slight shrug. No English. That’s okay, there was almost certainly no ice and I probably shouldn’t be drinking the water anyway.

He came back quickly, carrying a large black tray. He placed an espresso-sized cup on a saucer and a
finjan,
a small copper pot with a long handle, in front of me. Then he set down several plates of food that I had not ordered.

‘Excuse me, I’m sorry, I didn’t order this,’ I told him, pointing to the food and shaking my head. He smiled and bowed, and walked back inside the café.

Despite the heat, I put my face near the
finjan.
My skin absorbed the hot, fragrant steam that rose from it. It smelled like the desert, exotic and strange. It smelled like music I’d heard the night before while wandering the city. It smelled like something
familiar that I recognised from a time and a place I’d never been. I knew that, forever after, this smell of coffee and cardamom, and not the diesel-filled air and fishy-smelling, stagnant Nile that crawled along at the end of this street, would mean Cairo to me. I took hold of the handle and poured. The liquid was thick and dark, and flowed like mud. I sipped. It scalded the roof of my mouth. It was so bitter I didn’t know if I’d be able to swallow it, and when I finally did, it left small grounds of beans and seeds on my tongue.

‘You must add a lot of sugar and let it all settle to the bottom before you pour,’ said the man sitting at the other table. He took the sugar bowl from his table and brought it, along with his own cup of coffee, to mine, and helped himself to a seat. ‘You must be patient,’ he told me. ‘Life is slow in the desert.’ He dropped seemingly countless cubes of sugar into the
finjan,
then took hold of the handle and swirled it slowly in his hand, mixing the sugar, coffee and spices gently together. ‘Now we let it sit for a few minutes.’

‘We?’

He laughed. ‘My name is Nasr.’

He was extremely good looking in that Omar Sharif way. His eyes were so dark that even the whites were a light shade of brown. His hair was wavy, grey at the edges, and even though it was still morning I could see he’d soon be ready for another shave.

I offered my hand, then pulled it away in case he wasn’t allowed to touch a woman in public. He was a bit startled and must have thought I was an idiot.

‘You are American?’ he asked, gallantly pretending not to have noticed my quick hand trick.

‘Yes,’ I answered. American by way of Tel Aviv, where I had been living for the last year and a half, but that was not a detail worth mentioning right now. I had arrived yesterday evening
after a long day’s bus ride along the Mediterranean coast, past the Israeli towns of Ashdod and Ashkelon, past the very dreary and creepy Gaza Strip, through the Suez Canal, then west into Cairo.

‘Please,’ Nasr said, gesturing widely to the plates of food on the table, ‘eat. Don’t let me bother you.’

‘This isn’t mine; I didn’t order it. And, besides, it’s too hot out to eat.’

I looked over at Nasr. He wasn’t even sweating.

‘I think you have never eaten an Egyptian breakfast before,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’ He didn’t need an answer. ‘I will help you. I will tell you what everything is, then you taste it and tell me if you like it, all right?’ He took a deep whiff from the
finjan,
then poured us both another cup.

I wondered how many women this man had charmed, literally, out of their pants.

This was not the first time I had been given a tour of a meal; I had been hit on by Nasr’s Israeli (and French and Italian) counterparts, men just as eager to strut around and puff out their tail feathers, men just as macho and just as handsome. But so what? If it made them happy, then who was I to say no? Who was I to deny this man the pleasure of explaining it all to me and why on earth would I deny myself the pleasure of watching him do so?

I liked being in this part of the world; it was refreshing to be in a place where the culture’s ideal shape for a woman was the one I had. In the Middle East, you don’t have to look like Barbie to find clothes that fit or men that look. The men here aren’t looking for Barbie. Unless, of course, she puts out.

‘I think you recognise this, yes?’ He was pointing to a slightly cracked clay bowl.

I decided to sit back and let Nasr take my hand and be my guide, to journey through this breakfast and see it through his eyes.

The bowl Nasr was pointing to held a chopped salad loaded with fresh tomatoes, onions and cucumbers, and sprinkled with oregano, thyme, sesame seeds and salt. The whole thing was dressed with olive oil and lemon juice.

‘This is
za’atar,
’ he explained, indicating the mixture of dried herbs on the top. ‘My father is Egyptian, my mother is from Lebanon. In Lebanon, the people believe that
za’atar
makes the mind alert and the body strong. For this reason, the children eat
za’atar
for breakfast before an important exam. I was not a very good student so my mother thought it was a good idea for me to eat it every morning, even when there was no exam.’

‘Did it work?’ I asked.

He grinned and patted his chest. ‘As you can see.’ His teeth were straight and even and the whiteness of them was almost, well, blinding in that dark face of his. He wore the smile well.

He heaped a large serving of salad onto my plate and leaned back in his chair to watch me eat.

The salad was stunning, a mixture of tangy, oily, salty and herby. It tasted like summer, the vegetables ripened on the vine by the desert sun.

‘It’s delicious,’ I said and held out my plate. ‘More, please.’

But he ignored my plea. ‘You have to leave room for the other food.’

There was a tin bowl with designs hammered into it filled with large brown eggs. As I sat there with Nasr, it occurred to me that in all of my ‘worldly experience’, I had never actually eaten a brown egg. I had seen them, of course, here and there, but I had never tasted one. I was pleased that these were brown; they would only add to the unfolding mystery of the morning.

Nasr picked one up and rolled it in his hand.

‘How do you know if this egg is raw or cooked?’ he asked. He tossed it higher and higher in the air, catching it easily each time. He leaned towards me. ‘Here, I will show you a trick. Watch. All
you have to do is spin the egg. If it spins tight and fast, then it is cooked. If it spins like a drunken camel, then it is raw.’ He offered me the egg. ‘Here, you try.’

I smiled. ‘Or we can do it the old-fashioned way,’ I said. I took the egg and tapped it not-so-gently on the table. ‘We’re in luck; it’s cooked.’ I started to pick the pieces of shell off the egg and was startled to find that the egg itself was not brown. I was confused and disappointed; I was expecting something more colourful, more interesting, something less … white.

‘How come the egg’s not brown?’ I asked him, possibly a bit too accusingly.

He picked up another egg and held it in front of my face. ‘But it
is
brown.’

‘No, I mean on the inside. I thought it would be brown on the inside.’

‘All eggs are white on the inside. At least, that is how it is in Egypt. I don’t know what colour your eggs are in America.’

I felt like I was about to start rambling, but I went on anyway. ‘Then why are they brown on the outside?’

‘Why are they brown? Because they come from brown chickens. If you want white eggs, you have to have white chickens. But only on the outside are they different, on the inside they are always the same.’

Was that true? About the eggs and the chickens? How come I didn’t know this? And did that mean it was true about brown cows giving chocolate milk? I had grown up in a small town and a lot of my friends and classmates had lived on farms, but I had never noticed whether there were any brown chickens around. The first boy I ever kissed, Robert P., lived on a big farm in the field behind my house, but kissing him was the closest I ever came to becoming a farmer’s wife.

If what Nasr had said about chickens was true, I thought, then there must have been only white ones where I lived. Which, in
retrospect, pretty much summed up the town as a whole. My family had added the only bit of ethnic flavour to the place, and my house had been a popular gathering spot – the food was so much better. Thanks to us, there were people in that hick town who had actually tasted matzo balls and gefilte fish. (But they had returned the favour: it was at their houses that I ate ham and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise on that soft kind of white bread that you could roll into little balls.)

Nasr held an egg in his hand and looked directly into my eyes. ‘They are like people, eh?’

‘You mean different on the outside but alike on the inside?’ It was so clichéd that it had to be true.

He continued looking at me, then abruptly looked away, but not before I noticed that even with skin as dark as Nasr’s, a blush will show through.

‘We’re not done with our breakfast tour,’ he said, recovering from his serious moment. I smiled and sat back and wondered what other treasures this man would reveal.

‘Here. This. Do you know what this is?’ He was pointing to a plate of flat doughy bread.

‘Pita,’ I answered.

Ah, pita. Delicious, hot pita, fresh from the oven. Small crumbs of guilt began to gather in my stomach. It was Passover, the commemoration of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, and part of our tradition is that we do not eat bread during this holiday. I had made a reverse exodus: I had left Israel and come to Egypt, but only for a week. I figured it would not be a very gracious-guest-like-thing to mention to him that, at this exact moment, all over the world,
my
people were celebrating their freedom from slavery at the hands of
his
people. And I certainly wasn’t about to start talking about the ten plagues that were set upon the Egyptians, or how the Red Sea parted, but only for the Jews. It would just be rude.

What the hell. I reached for the pita, but Nasr pulled it back and shook his head. ‘Not yet.’ He pulled a plateful of thick creamy beige paste towards him. It was topped with a swirl of a lighter paste and that was topped with another swirl of thick amber-coloured olive oil. Scattered over it all were pine nuts. I knew what it was, but I wanted to hear him tell me. He did not disappoint.

‘This is hummus,’ he informed me. ‘It’s made of chickpeas and sesame – very healthy.’

Nasr ripped off a piece of pita and used it to stir the pastes and oil and pine nuts together, then scooped up a large dollop and handed it to me.

I held it over the plate so it wouldn’t drip onto my clothes.

He served himself a healthy dose, then went on. ‘On top is tahini, sesame paste, and on top of that is olive oil, from right here.’ He swept the air with his arm. ‘From Cairo.’

Olive oil – the magic elixir. I could just imagine Nasr telling me about it:
Olive oil goes back to the beginning of this land and its people. It is believed to grant youth and strength. Olive branches are the symbol of peace and the reward for battle. Resistant to strong outside forces, bending with the never-ending winds, the trees symbolise this region. Nothing can destroy them.

Or something like that.

But instead, he was telling me about the hummus. ‘It is the most important food in the Middle East,’ he said, ‘and one of the oldest, but not everyone knows how to make it just right.’

‘But you do.’

‘Of course.’ There was the grin – I could get used to that grin. He gestured to me to eat. I took a bite. I felt my eyes widen and I knew I must have looked like some American tourist who was tasting something for the first time that hadn’t come from McDonald’s, but I didn’t care.

I had never thought of bread as a food that can melt in your mouth, but that’s exactly what this pita did. It was one of the
most delicious things I had ever tasted. The hummus was smooth and rich. I swallowed. Then I was punched by the after-kick. I gasped and my eyes began to water. I looked around frantically for the glass of water that had never arrived. I grabbed the
finjan
and poured myself a cup of what was left, which was pretty much nothing but sludge. I gulped it down anyway.